Month: February 2011

More Email From Egypt

Seth Roberts1 Comment

My former student writes:

A lot of people here now are calling for a return to normalcy and peace! A fair number of people are beginning to blame the protestors for all the chaos and the fact that we can’t go out and we can’t go to work and Egypt is burning and we can’t order food from restaurants anymore! I think they are the same people who didn’t really support the protestors in the first place though- so we’re still safe- they’re not growing. Unfortunately many of my family members are among those- they just want to go back to work and they’re worried about money and they think we have gained enough concessions. They think the sacrifice is too big.

At the same time, there are maybe a hundred thousand or more protestors in the square right now, peacefully standing and holding signs for the president to step down. And more keep pouring in. My cousin Akram is getting ready to go meet my cousin Khaled and about 20 of his friends to go to the square. Aunt Magda is angry with Akram and telling him that he won’t set foot out of the house but actually he is tying his shoelaces now….. The Friday prayer ended about an hour ago so now is the time when most people will be arriving there or on their way. My cousin Karim actually went back to work at Vodafone today after 4 or so days off because of the revolt.

I have promised everyone that I wouldn’t go out today because of all the anti-foreign sentiment. There have been steady streams of emails about foreigners being detained, politely, and spoken to and then released after some time. But there are people calling the news stations in angry about Obama’s order for the president to step down. One woman asked, “Can any country accept an order for their president to step down?” There is a lot of hostility towards America right now and I don’t think the US can win no matter what they do. People criticizing the states for not making a strong enough statement requiring Mubarak’s departure, others angry that America would order the president of another country to step down, some angry about all of the past support, and others angry that America would meddle at all…

We haven’t seen any violence in the square so far today as there was on Wednesday and Thursday, just a massive sea of anti-mubarak protestors. We haven’t seen much of the pro-mubarak supporters today- it seems that they have been hugely overtaken. I really hope it stays peaceful but a lot of people are going out angry today because of the attacks on the peaceful anti-mubarak supporters of the last two days. Many see it as an obligation to go out now and defend those who have been attacked. I am really proud of all those people brave enough to go out…

Email From Egypt

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One of my students is in Egypt. She writes:

I may be leaving here soon. Two of the foreigners here that I know that were in the protests have been arrested by the army and taken to a military academy- they were able to contact the German embassy as they are German and the embassy came to take them and keep them safe in a hostel until they are able to leave the country. People are beginning not to trust any foreigners here, not only journalists, and have begun to say that foreigners are spies stirring up trouble on behalf of foreign governments. The German girl that I went to the demonstrations with saw her own Egyptian neighbor talking to the army officers about her and her landlord and her roommates while she was being detained. Of course all journalists are being attacked right now. And the mood has just become very hostile towards foreigners. We are getting reports on a mailing list called Cairo Scholars (for foreigners living in Cairo) of all different types of incidents directed at foreigners here.

Chinese New Year in Beijing

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Sounds like we’re under attack. Bombs going off, gunfire. A few fireworks.

More At midnight I was awakened by the densest loudest fireworks I have ever seen. About two per second for ten minutes or even longer. One launch pad was on the street near my apartment; I could see two other sources further away — geysers of glittery light. This proves the Chinese invented fireworks, I kept thinking. They were so pretty and varied I didn’t mind being woken up. And it was so nice to be able to watch them from my warm apartment.

Personal Science

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In the IEEE Spectrum, Paul McFedries, the author of Word Spy, writes about new words generated by new kinds of science made possible by cheap computing.

Perhaps the biggest data set of all is the collection of actions, choices, and preferences that each person performs throughout the day, which is called his or her data exhaust. Using such data for scientific purposes is called citizen science. This is noisy data in that most of it is irrelevant or even misleading, but there are ways to cull signal.

That’s not my understanding of what citizen science means. I’ve seen it used when non-scientists (“citizens”) help professional scientists. The Wikipedia definition is

projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation

Bird-watching, for example.

My self-experimentation is not citizen science. I am not doing it to help a professional scientist nor as part of a project. I do it to help myself — in contrast to professional science, which is a job. Almost all self-experimentation by professional scientists and doctors has been done as part of their job. So let me coin a term that describes what I do: personal science. Science done to help the person doing it.

I believe personal science will grow enormously, for several reasons: 1. Lower cost. The necessary equipment, such as software, costs less and less. I use R, which is free. 2. Greater income. People can afford more stuff. 3. More leisure time. 4. More is known. The more you know, the more effective your research will be. The more you know the better your choice of treatment, experimental design, and measurement and the better your data analysis. 5. More access to what is known. For example, Dennis Mangan discovered via the internet that niacin had cured restless leg syndrome. 6. Professional scientists unable to solve problems. They are crippled by career considerations, poor training, the need to get another grant, desire to show off (projects are too large and too expensive), and a Veblenian dislike of being useful. As a result, problems that professionals can’t solve are solved by amateurs. The best-known example is the invention of blood-glucose self-monitoring by Richard Bernstein, who was not a doctor when he invented it.

Effect of Oscar on Marriage

Seth Roberts5 Comments

This study found that women who win a Best Actress Oscar have a much higher rate of divorce in the following years than the losing Best Actress nominees and the Best Actor nominees, both winning and losing. A Chinese joke I heard recently says essentially the same thing:

There are four kinds of people: 1. Man. 2. Woman. 3. Woman with a Ph.D. 4. Someone who will marry a woman with a Ph.D.

Via Marginal Revolution.

“Reading Seth Roberts Puts Me to Sleep”

Seth Roberts3 Comments

… is the charming title of this post by Adam Stoffa. Actually, reading me keeps him asleep. Adam read my long self-experimentation paper and came across my discovery that skipping breakfast reduced early awakening. He had early awakening:

I would wake up sometime between 0400 and 0430. Six hours of sleep was not good. This was a problem that needed my attention.

Like me, he was eating breakfast around 7 am and waking up three hours earlier. He ate a big breakfast. He decided to make breakfast later rather than skip it.

I started experimenting with a late breakfast in August. I was traveling through multiple time zones at the time. So I had no idea whether it was working. But by the time I got back to Korea, eating a late breakfast was becoming a habit.

After recovering from my jet lag, I noticed that the experiment was working. Now, I wake up and get out of bed between 0600 and 0615. Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night, but after a quick bathroom break, I’m right back to sleep. I get to work at 0800. After working for an hour, I take a break and eat (e.g. 3 hard boiled eggs, +/- a cup of cashews or macadamia nuts, and a smoothie). This regiment has been working well for eight weeks and shows no signs of weakening.

Yay!